​Two weeks ago tonight, Tim had a major accident. I don't quite have the language to explain it all. For those of you who are friends with me on Facebook, you may have read the rant I posted the following morning, Thanksgiving:

I am grateful for the woman with the calm and kind voice on the 911 call, who told me what to do. To the paramedics who appeared minutes later and carried Tim onto a stretcher, down rain-covered steps and into the ambulance. To all the drivers I saw on the highway as I followed behind the flashing red and blue lights, every single car that pulled aside and let them pass. To the doctor and nurses, to that entire building full of people trained in caring for humans that we found ready and waiting to help us. To that young doctor who did the MRA scan and found most of the ribs on Tims left side broken but miraculously the lungs full, miraculously the inner organs unaffected. I am grateful to the Family of Morins and Tyrrells who texted, called, said they’d do anything, and a global community of sangha jewels who sent Buddha’s blessings, mantras of protection. I’m grateful to my teacher for teaching me how to sit and hold love in my heart and know that life is simply about these moments, how developing wisdom and compassion and helping those in need is the real meaning of our lives. And now home, with Tim by my side. Gratitude.​In the two weeks since, I have met my Dharma practice in a way I've never met it before. And by this I mean that my Dharma and meditation practice has come to life in a new way.

​It was Sunday afternoon, 13 August 2017. The afternoon light was falling over potted plants in my living room. I had spent four days away from my phone and laptop, walking through forests with my family who were visiting from the UK. I had kayaked in the ocean and remembered what it felt like to touch water, air, land.

It was 4pm and I sat on the sofa in the now-quiet house, and flicked my iPhone awake. And there was the Facebook newsfeed. Protests of white supremacists marching in Virginia. Anger. Violence. Horror. The shock that hits you deep in your stomach. The same shock that came when I read about planes falling out of the air and bombs going off by marathon runners. The shock of witnessing humans hurt one another.

I scrolled further, switching over to news outlets and learning the facts. But then something else appeared in my Facebook feed. Something so drastically different that it astounded me.

A blog post that tries to make sense of falling planes, bombs being dropped on living beings, and our inherent capacity for peace. How do we react?

(This blog was first published on July 10, 2014. I am reposting it again today because of the recent news, and my wish to find peace in this world. I welcome your feedback below): I walked into my apartment, opened my laptop and the first story was there. Of a Malaysian Airlines flight shot down over the Ukraine. Images of a scarred landscape. Intense, manifest suffering.

​I got up, put on the kettle, sat down. Felt utter panic. Put on the radio. After 30 minutes of radio, internet, and the shock in journalists voices, the tears came. And a thought kept circling my mind: my people, my people, my people. The people of my world.

I saw a woman yesterday, as I stood waiting for a bus in Portland, Maine. An art student giving out free hugs. A line on her placard read: “Love is unconquerable and constant.”

I’d spent the morning putting up posters for a meditation course about “Overcoming Anger”- the timing was uncanny and accidental. I walked into coffee shops, oddly silent with 20-year olds tethered to laptops and phones, not talking to one another, their faces blue from the electricity. Perhaps still in shock from the election result. The cashiers seemed relieved to see the posters.

Then in the afternoon, I took a coach to the moneyed towers of Boston where cafes were now full and buzzing with college students. I was having tea with my friend from our Buddhist center. While I waited for her, I read the newspaper stuck under the glass tabletop, the front page from November 23, 1963. The day after JFK was killed. I read about how Johnson that day walked down a lonely corridor of the White House, "bearing the tremendous weight and burden” of becoming the leader of the free world.

After tea, we crossed the road outside and joined a protest for Standing Rock that just so happened to be taking place in a corner of Boston Common. Under the architecture of an ancient church, the sun set on this first day of this new reality of life in America. And I had my first tangible taste of its ancient past.

There were maybe 100 people gathered. Listening. That’s what struck me first, how deeply they were listening—without screens or electricity in the way. A string of speakers spoke as wafts of sage moved through the air, as rush hour buses carried exhausted commuters home.

The women of various tribes talked about water. Because it is the women of many of these tribes who are the ones in charge of talking about the water, the giver of life.

​They finished with a song and one drum. I listened to those circular calls. I stood there in that November night air, with that crowd of people, and we listened to two men's voices circling around the two trees standing beside the glass and metal towers, singing a song that once would have bounced off forests and lakes.

​This morning, I sit and write and attempt to let the emotions of the past three days find alignment. So I can release them to the wind. How does one reconcile the terrorist attacks in Paris? How does one react to a world filled with this sort of pain? In the lead-up to this past weekend, I had been deep in preparation for a meditation retreat. As a volunteer in my local Buddhist center, I was helping to lead a full-day retreat on Saturday November 14 called Tranquil Abiding - Buddha's astonishingly clear teachings on how to still the mind, to bring it to complete focus.

​2015 has been a year of intense writing—although I've been strangely silent on this blog. I've been working on three chapters for a book about Chinese women artists - 12,000 words of Hong Kong art history. At the same time, I've been deep in the editing worlds of Art Radar Asia and the Asia Art Archive. But on the plane this summer, as I flew up into the atmosphere from the French summer fields, as we darted into plumes of white clouds, I had a revelation. It's like the clouds spoke to me. They parted the clutter of thoughts in my mind and delivered the plot.

I first met Mei at a dim sum restaurant in Portland. It was October 2013 and Suzanne Fox and I had put on an event with the curator and translator Valerie Doran. A quiet legend, Valerie has worked alongside the likes of Johnson Chang Tsong-zung and played a seminal role in the emergence of the Chinese avant garde to the world in the early 90s. I had lured her up to this New England sea port to speak about 5,000 years of Chinese art history.

At this lunch event, Mei Selvage appeared, her eyes wide with inspiration, telling me that she was an artist based here in Portland. It was almost like we had generated the entire event for her - so intensely did she respond to the themes of the talk. The two of us exchanged phone numbers and met up again the following month. She came dressed in a funky Tibetan wool hat and handed me a photograph of one of her artworks, Tao Seeker (below).

For the past 48 hours, I have been tied to my Facebook and Twitter feeds like a drug. Like a drip, that has been feeding me with news and sounds and sights. I have been unable to leave it. Perhaps it's because I am watching these mass scenes of civil disobedience in Hong Kong and want to be there. I grew up amid those streets - and I can't walk out the front door right now. I'm stuck in the US, so I need to read my way through this.

I've hung out with Hong Kong's punk rockers and artists and dancers and I've come to know its soul through my work as an arts writer there - one of ancient fishing village meets Bladerunner futurism. One of killer movie industries, 4am cha cha tengs, Beyond, and a resilient and utterly unique culture that has grown from its ancient Chinese roots despite all the crap that colonialism has thrown its way.

Today was intense. It involved tears. You may remember when I gleefully wrote of my first driving lesson. It was two summers ago. I had sat with a group of 15 year olds through a Driver's Ed series (I was old enough to mother them all) and then my driving teacher, DJ, took me out for a spin. That blog contained the seeds of freedom and glee. I did my written exam, got my permit and... two years passed. And not much driving practice occurred.

For the past five days, I've been submersed in a world of powerful peace. The kind of peace that wraps kindness around your temples and pulls your center of gravity out of your fast-paced head and down into your heart. The kind of peace that is like cotton wool headphones plugging you into another soundtrack. Where air and space take the place of busy sound. Where we can begin to slow down the cogs.